La Vendée eBook

Denot himself would neither say or do anything.
Henri never saw him; but de Lescure had different
interviews with him, and did all in his power to rouse
him to some feeling as to the future; but all in vain.
He usually refused to make any answer whatever, and
when he did speak, he merely persisted in his declaration
that he was willing to die, and that if he were left
alive, he had no wish at all as to what should become
of him. It was at last decided to send him to
his own house at Fleury, with a strong caution to
the servants there that their master was temporarily
insane; and there to leave him to his chance.
“When he finds himself alone, and disregarded,”
said de Lescure, “he will come to his senses,
and probably emigrate: it is impossible for us
now to do more for him. May God send that he
may live to repent the great crime which he has attempted.”

Now again everything was bustle and confusion at Durbelliere.
Arms and gunpowder were again collected. The
men again used all their efforts in assembling the
royalist troops, the women in preparing the different
necessaries for the army. The united families
were at Durbelliere, and there was no longer any danger
of their separation, for at Clisson not one stone
was left standing upon another.

VOLUME III

CHAPTER I

Robespierre’s character.

We will now jump over a space of nearly three months,
and leaving the chateaux of royalist La Vendee, plunge
for a short while into the heart of republican Paris.
In the Rue St. Honore lived a cabinet-maker, named
Duplay, and in his house lodged Maximilian Robespierre,
the leading spirit in the latter and more terrible
days of the Revolution. The time now spoken of
was the beginning of October, 1793; and at no period
did the popularity and power of that remarkable man
stand higher.

The whole government was then vested in the Committee
of Public Safety—­a committee consisting
of twelve persons, members of the Convention, all
of course ultra-democrats, over the majority of whom
Robespierre exercised a direct control. No despot
ever endured ruled with so absolute and stringent
a dominion as that under which this body of men held
the French nation. The revolutionary tribunal
was now established in all its horror and all its
force. A law was passed by the Convention, in
September, which decreed that all suspected people
should be arrested and brought before this tribunal;
that nobles, lawyers, bankers, priests, men of property,
and strangers in the land, should be suspected unless
known to be acting friends and adherents of the ultra-revolutionary
party; that the punishment of such persons should
be death; and that the members of any revolutionary
tribunal which had omitted to condemn any suspected
person, should themselves be tried, and punished by
death. Such was the law by which the Reign of
Terror was organized and rendered possible.